It’s not an easy topic to have a conversation about. We have been taught a lot of things about sex, but how often do we talk about how God created it and that it’s a GOOD thing? Listen now to this episode as Kathi and Erin discuss their new book Hot Mama: 12 Secrets to a Sizzling Hot Marriage

Join the conversation where we encourage each other to have a better sex life!

Hey friends- this is Kathi. I could NOT be more thrilled to have Shaunti Feldhahn on the blog today. This woman changed the course of my marriage with her book For Women Only – Understanding the secret Lives of Men and now she’s done it again with her latest book. Keep reading! And don’t forget to comment at the end and be entered in to win all five of our books featured this week!

Show him you’re safe with his secrets – including one key burden he has probably never shared.

Ladies, did you know your man has a secret? It may not even be an intentional secret, mind you, but a very personal burden that often stays hidden by default. Nearly all men face it, but few feel able to really talk about it with their wives. Yet if we know how to talk to our husbands about this and show them that they can talk to us about it, we will learn so much more about each other and go to a new level of intimacy we didn’t realize we were missing.

Here’s the secret burden: even the most honorable, godly man today lives in a culture saturated with enticing images that he cannot avoid, and which stimulate his brain in a sexual way even if he does not want them to.

When I first started doing research about men, I was stunned to realize that this applied even to men who were very trustworthy, even to men who worked to keep their thought lives pure, even to men who adored their wives and wanted to honor their wives (and God) in their choices. And it wasn’t just other men – it was my man! I started to realize that there was big part of my husband’s life, including how his brain processed the world every day, about which I was completely clueless.

And if I was missing a big part of my husband’s life, wouldn’t there always be a limit to how close we could be? I didn’t want him to carry a burden on his own only because he didn’t know how to talk about it – or didn’t know if he could trust me with it.

So I started to ask questions, tentatively at first. (“Um… What do you think, when you see something like that hot woman in the skin-tight shirt who just walked past us at Target?”) And he started to give some answers, definitely tentatively at first. (“Uh… why do you want to know…?”)

But as I showed him that I wasn’t going to bash or condemn, but truly just wanted to understand (“Honestly, honey, it’s because I love you and just want to understand what life is like for you”) he began to open up and share things we’d never talked about before.

Some of it was hilarious. (“She must have paid a lot of money for those.”) Frankly, some of it was hard to hear. (“Well, OK, to be honest, sometimes when I see someone almost undressed, there’s this micro-second flash of wanting to picture what she might look like if she is undressed. And then I have to immediately stop that flash and think about that work email instead.”) There were times I was sad, or hurt, as my husband shared certain struggles he’d had on and off over the years. But I tried so hard to not let those feelings control me and instead tried to show my husband that I wanted him to be able to share what was going on inside him.

Because as I began to do more of the research on the male brain wiring, I began to realize: men’s brains are actually designed by God to be visually stimulated in this way, because the only revealing image a man was ever supposed to see was of his wife! And yet today, this culture is filled will very public images that were only supposed to be seen in private. Our men and boys are living in a visual minefield.

[Tweet “Men’s brains are designed by God to be visually stimulated.”]

Some men make rigorous choices to look away, look down, take those thoughts captive. Others have grown weary of that struggle and have given into the temptation to look at things that they shouldn’t have, and many feel great shame in doing so. Still others—although a much smaller number – have become trapped or addicted.

Yet many of them have one thing in common: they wish they could talk to their wives about it. They wish they could open up about their struggles. They wish they could come in from a particularly bad day at work and say, without fear of condemnation, “Wow, Kerri at the office missed doing up those top two buttons on her shirt again and I couldn’t focus on a thing she was saying.” Or if they are trapped in looking at porn, something deep inside sometimes wants to come into the light and get help – and yet the self-protective side says “no way!” So all of it stays hidden. All too often, a man handles all of this on his own.

But I think lots of us as women wouldn’t want our men to handle this all on their own. That was one of the main things that spurred me to do the research that became my book For Women Only and later, my new book Through A Man’s Eyes. I wanted my husband to know that I was safe to talk to about this, even as he also knew that if there were any real issues (which, thankfully, there hadn’t been in recent years), I would expect him to get help. And once we started talking about this, once he saw I wouldn’t freak out or condemn, we found that if we could talk about this in a healthy way, we could talk about anything.

I urge all my sisters out there: show your husband that you are safe to talk to. Even if you are hearing some difficult things, show him you love and support him anyway and you’ll walk with him through it. Learning how to talk about those things you’ve never talked about before will take your marriage to a whole new dimension of intimacy. A place where you have no secrets and where you know and love each other fully, regardless.

To win a copy of all 5 books featured this week, leave a comment below!

Shaunti Feldhahn is the best-selling author of eye-opening, research-based books about men, women and relationships, including For Women Only, For Men Only, the groundbreaking The Good News About Marriage, and her newest book, Through A Man’s Eyes. A Harvard-trained social researcher and popular speaker, her ?ndings are regularly featured in media as diverse as The Today Show, Focus on the Family, and the New York Times. Visit www.shaunti.com for more.

Hey Friends – this is Kathi! I’m excited that you’re joining us for our 5 Days to a better marriage series. Day 1 is my friend Arlene Pellicane.. You are going to LOVE Arlene as much as I do- she is all about becoming the happiest version of you that you can be. I like that in a person!

Make your marriage great! – kathi

It’s Easy Being Married to You by Arlene Pellicane

A few years ago, James and I did a Daniel fast. He had lost 5 pounds and I had lost a pathetic half pound. As he teased me, I defended myself by declaring, “I’m not doing it to lose weight. I’m doing it as unto God!” Of course to be honest, I was trying to lose weight but it felt good to rationalize.

Things were going downhill fast. I did not think it was easy being married to James at that moment. Keep in mind that we are fasting and here we are arguing! After awhile, we weren’t even sure what we were fighting about. We both concluded that we were under spiritual attack so we prayed together.

James disappeared and I heard the garage door open. I thought he was sneaking out to buy me flowers. But a few minutes later, he came in the room holding our box full of love letters from when we were dating, engaged and newly married. He asked me to pull out three random letters to read together. Hysterically, one of the letters was from our first months of marriage. It was my response to a question he had written, “What do I do that pushes your buttons and irritates you?”

It was divinely funny! I was mad that losing five pounds was easy for James, but not for me. You can see how the Holy Spirit led me to pick that exact letter out of more than one hundred notes.

Since you live with your spouse, it’s inevitable that you will butt heads, step on each other’s toes, and rub each other the wrong way. When we make our disappointments larger than life and rehearse them over and over again, we can’t appreciate the good husbands we have. That’s why I’ve found it so helpful to replace the self-talk of “You are so difficult to live with” to “It’s easy being married to you.”

[Tweet “You live with your spouse. It’s inevitable that you will butt heads. #bettermarriage5”]

What are the things you love and appreciate about your husband? You can start a running list of reasons why it’s easy to love him. Here’s the start of mine…it’s easy to love James because:

He’s a man of integrity who keeps his word.

He laughs every day.

He’s a great listener and doesn’t just endure our conversations; he actually enjoys them (or at least always gives me that impression!).

He’s a pro-active father.

I’m just getting warmed up! Now it’s your turn to think about why it’s easy being married to your man. The more positive traits you look for, the more you will find. Leave a comment about one of your husband’s positive traits.

[Tweet “What are the things you love and appreciate about your husband? #bettermarriage5”]

Arlene Pellicane is a speaker and author of 31 Days to Becoming a Happy Mom and 31 Days to a Happy Husband. She is also the co-author of Growing Up Social: Raising Relational Kids in a Screen-Driven World (with Gary Chapman). She has been a featured guest on the Today Show, Fox & Friends, Focus on the Family, FamilyLife Today, The 700 Club, and Turning Point with Dr. David Jeremiah.

Arlene lives in the San Diego area with her husband James and their three children.

Remember back when you were first married? The romance, the candlelit dinners, the anticipation of that good night kiss . . . and then you had kids.

Let’s be blunt: kids, while adorable and lovable and a gift from God, are romance killers. Suddenly come-hither looks are replaced with bleary-eyed glances accompanied by the vague notion that the guy across the dinner table looks familiar, but you just can’t quite place him.

Well, that guy is your husband and the two of you deserve more! It’s time to put your marriage first, to commit to intentional (and intense!) romance. We all have budgets and packed schedules, so inside this short ebook you’ll find tips and tricks that fit your lifestyle.

If you’re ready to fall in love all over again, you’re ready for this Hot Mama Challenge!

A girlfriend told us last week that she’s planning a girl’s night to go watch 50 Shades of Grey with her friends in a few weeks. And another friend is planning on going to the movie with her husband for their Valentine’s Day night out.

We hope they have a great time. Really, we do. But we won’t be going with them.

Because we’ll be at home having sex with our husbands.

We’ll just come right out and say it: We’re not feeling overly enthused with the entire 50 Shades of Grey phenomenon. Are these the kind of romantic heroes on which we want to base our love stories?

It doesn’t make sense to us.

We don’t want that for ourselves, but even more, we can’t stand the thought of our daughters believing that 50 Shades of Grey is a modern fairy tale. And we’re afraid that’s exactly where our culture is headed: Christian Grey has been elevated to some sort of modern Mr. Darcy and the true romantic heroes of our time—men like our husbands who cherish us and have never demeaned us—are labeled as… boring?

It really doesn’t make sense.

But we don’t have to let it make sense. We can stand up and say that we don’t want Anastasia and Christian to be our romantic example. Not when we have so many better examples—examples of men and women who have chosen to love each other fully, to never demean, to never demoralize, to keep sex as a wonderful, intimate gift that always builds, always protects, always loves.

We want that kind of love.

Not boring. Not prude. Not a vanilla-missionary-between-the-sheets-every-Friday-at-eight type. But a love full of passion, full of romance. The kind of love that dances in the living room naked to the Bee-Jees at 8’o clock on a Tuesday. I want us to kiss often and laugh even more. I want to make our kids say “EWWW!” when we make out while in the minivan. I want us to try new things, to get to know each other, to keep each other guessing, to have a red hot sex life that knows no bounds other than to keep each other fully engaged. And to show each other that we are fully loved.

That’s what we want. For ourselves and for our daughters and their future husbands. And for all of our friends who want the same things.

Which is why we wrote our book series, Hot Mama. We want sex to be a good thing—no, an amazing thing—and we want the Christian women in America to have the tools and inspiration to make it everything it can be.

And it’s also why we’ve come up with an alternative to watching 50 Shades of Grey. We’re calling it the 50 Shades Movie Challenge. It’s pretty simple: While women across America are standing in rainy lines outside of theaters on February 14th waiting to watch 50 Shades of Grey, you will be at home having sex. Because why watch two people having sex when you can actually have sex with your husband?

Will you join us?

If so, feel free to grab one of the images from this post and post it on your Facebook page along with an explanation as to why you will be doing what you’re doing. (As if you need an explanation to have hot sex with your husband.) Let’s start a new revolution. And make marriages in America hotter.

PLUS, to help make this challenge even easier, we’ll be giving away 10 copies of our new e-Book, 10 Ideas to Inspire Red Hot Sex, to 10 people who share this post on their Facebook pages. Just share the link to your Facebook post in the comments on this blog and you’ll be entered to win. Good luck!

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